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108705-carbine-please-help-the-empty-servers-page-4
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 Content 100% agree. Even IF populations were low, game systems that incentivise concurrency and longer play time each week would make it feel much more full. Population obviously has gone down since launch (as per the hype-curve); but the major concurrency problem is the systems in game IMHO. | |} ---- That isn't at all how statistics works. Raptr is a sample OF GAMERS, not games. it tracks what games are played as a % of gamers activity. If A game is very popular; most of those sample will have it; if it's niche; few will have it. The Raptr sample isn't a 'fallacy' it's a psuedo-random systematic sample of the gamer population. All of your claimed assumptions are irrelevant to actual data analysis and statistical theory. | |} ---- Right, its based on WHO has the program installed. Can you not see this? 1 million people could have Leisure suit larry installed and using programs 1 million people could have Wildstar installed and not use these programs Does this mean Leisure suit larry is more popular then wildstar because they are not using the program? | |} ---- I never said Overwolfs numbers were. Raptr's ARE because it is distributed with AMD equiped machines. So it introduces a slight bias into their data. That doesn't make the data useless or irrelevant; all data have SOME measure of bias in them, even if it's below detection levels / within analytical error. | |} ---- I'll take each point on it's own: You don't need to register the game with Overwolf. Even if you did, 10 million people, 1/8th of the gaming population, is enough of a sample size of people to create a model. Same answer as 1. Don't need an account with Overwolf for this, I doubt you need one for Raptr to do this as well. And the answer for 1 applies as well. Again, answer is the same as above. The sample is exactly that. A sample. If enough people do the steps above, which they do, you can use it to create a model of the gaming population. This is what statistics is about. | |} ---- Raptr comes on all AMD equipped machines and is NOT subject to voluntary download in those cases (though it is subject to voluntary opt-out). That nullifies your claim (which appears to be that because individuals opt into a service it some how nullifies the data. which is false). Anyone can download and run Raptr; and since it offers many benefits BESIDES data logging it is used by many gamers. But because it both offers desireable benefits AND comes standard on all AMD machines it is not subject to the non-issues you cite. | |} ---- How is it late, when the game was released in the 1st of June, drop 1 was a month later - around 1st of July and drop 2 was two months later - around the 1st of August? And about the declining trend of activity and argument around actual numbers. There is little to no point discussing it. Every MMORPG experiences decline of playerbase activity a couple of months after release. It's not about actual numbers, it's about the decline having a serious impact on the gameplay and radio silence from devs in this topic (on that matter in general). | |} ---- I don't share your opinion 100% but i will agree that systems are playing their role too. Imho low population is the major reason why the servers "seems" empty. But anyway, either its the one or the other, what must we do? Continue playing in ghost towns until some sort of megaserver arrives? Crossing fingers for a Dev answer? Quit? Could we have a time frame for a solution, in order to judge if its acceptable for us to pay until then? Because i don't think it is acceptable to keep paying just to play in ghost towns. At least not for long... | |} ---- Oh, I know, was just letting you know our process. I can only speak for Overwolf due to being their Community Manager. This isn't how statistics work and is an impossibility. How many of those gamers who play Leisure Suit Larry also play Wildstar? Probably a good amount, meaning they most likely have one of those programs, meaning the data would be collected. This is much more complex than that as many gamers cross game over multiple genres and games. For us, since it is unique games played, it dropped by numbers of people who play the game, which I think is a little more relevant to the discussion if we want to talk subs/people playing. It was number 19 on our lists as far as unique games played and now dropped out of our top 20 into number 24 or 25 so the number of unique players dropped. It's still very high up there though. | |} ---- ---- Can you please do me a quick favour and point me in the direction of the statistics for these programs? My wife wants to run them through SPSS and check the statistical significance. | |} ---- A good thing to do would be fix the systems and incentivise concurency... THEN asses the populations and move from there. Honestly I think that is what Carbine is doing. They are waiting to toss out the next drop with bug fixes / counters to the anti-concurency systems in place; then see where trends go. | |} ---- Raptr is a for-profit. You can use what data they release http://caas.raptr.com/category/data/ http://blog.raptr.com/ I'm sure your wife will have great success with SPSS, but when she's ready to do real statistics she can join the rest of us over in the r community | |} ---- Right, so all you have is percentages. No raw data? | |} ---- I doubt any company would give you the hard actual numbers. You can have this though http://www.newzoo.com/insights/wildstar-falls-hearthstone-rises-top-20-core-pc-games-rankings-july/ | |} ---- No company would give you real data. Unless you paid for it. | |} ---- That was for July. For the last 30 days: FFX 939k hours - position 12 TF2 669k hours - position 17 Swtor 668k hours - position 18 WS 478k hours - position 26 If you check weekly numbers: FFX 211k hours - position 12 SWTOR 180k hours - position 14 TF2 129k hours - position 21 WS 77k hours - position 42 So you can easily see that either it is interest / activity / subscribers the reason (or all together) WS is dropping fast and this is something you can easily check it by loging in the game. | |} ---- ---- ---- I don't want to offend you, but "i think" is NOT acceptable. On the contrary what IS acceptable is an announcement about this problem by Carbine, followed by a plan of how they are going to fix it. That's what ppl are asking for, not estimations by players or ppl who "thinks". Once again its nothing personal with you :) | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- No, for Overwolf you can't opt out of tracking nor need to launch the game from Overwolf. As I said before, if you have Overwolf running and play a game it will track it regardless of if it is supported, injected or you use Overwolf. And again, no it isn't. It's a statistical model of the PC market. If less people play Wildstar on one of these platforms you can statistically show that less people in general are playing Wildstar because the group of people who have one of these applications are a model for the entire gaming population. It is a model, a representation. Not written in stone. This is what statistics is and if your wife does or understands statistics as you mentioned above ask her to explain to you a model concept based off of a sample. | |} ---- Fair enough. I am 100% unfamiliar with Overwolf and it's data so I can't comment. I am not at all surprised though. I would wager between 25 and 40% dropped after the post launch hype died down. | |} ---- I don't wan't to offend you either Mama, but what you find acceptable is irrelevant. Carbine will do what it deems best, as will NCSoft. Likewise, that's not a personal thing at you; that's just the reality of the situation. Also could you please link the weekly numbers from Raptr? I haven't seen them, and would really appreciate a link. | |} ---- That's OK, not everyone is familiar with every single data outlets for such things. Some outlets are more suited for specific discussions. The hours played from Raptr is definitely a way to quantify the fact that while there might be many active people on the server, the amount of hours played has gone down leading to less player crossover and therefore less player interaction creating that "ghost town" feeling. Which is fair and completely normal for every MMO. Every single MMO ever has gone through the "Post launch slump" and lost members. It's completely normal. After the loss, is the fight back up and that is what Carbine needs to focus on. How to do that is up for debate, but ultimately it isn't our decision nor do we have all the correct information to make such decisions. | |} ---- What makes percentages not data? Are Ratios suddenly not quantitative? | |} ---- ---- Oh there fine, just we have no idea how they got to them. If we have the raw data, we could do our own statistical analysis and see if it correlates. | |} ---- Their methods are posted on their site...... Just because YOU claim ignorance doesn't mean the meta-data is unavailable. I'm pretty sure you don't understand what the term 'raw data' means... at least you are grossly misusing it in this context. | |} ---- Intuition tells us the earth is flat and the center of the galaxy, the sun is on fire, etc etc etc Reality is rarely what we perceive it to be through intuition alone. | |} ---- Retracted. | |} ---- Which is nothing any one of us has said..... at all. | |} ---- I 1) don't even watch stream 2) do not consider W* even remotely dead.... it isn't by a long shot | |} ---- Its not unacceptable if Carbine doesn't adopt a solution i (or others) suggest, but it is if they fail to simply respond to so many ppl's worries. Its also unacceptable if the only info we have about this matter, comes from players who "thinks" and not from Carbine itself. These things are totally unacceptable. As for Raptr now. Go to: Your profile-->games collection-->discover games-->top games being played. Just for the record i have more than 15k total mmo played hours. Almost 800 (797) hours of them at WS. | |} ---- Yeah, my mistake. | |} ---- I think you could have done much better with the analogy. With the introduction of science and the education system, I doubt ANYONE still "intuitively" thinks the earth is flat. Good grief..the stretches people go to. | |} ---- ---- OK to accurately compare: We need to compare subscription MMO's for the PC in that list: 1. WoW 2. FF14 3. Wildstar So on the positive side, its the 3rd most popular subscription based MMO on the PC. MMO's including Free to cancer MMO's 1. WoW 2. FF14 3. GW2 4. SWTOR 5. Wildstar 5th overall its pretty good. I'm happy with that. | |} ---- ---- But of course! Its on Twitter. Silly us. (My point being; after 25 pages of this topic, the devs couldnt take 1 minute to post that same response on THEIR OWN FORUMS?) | |} ---- Of next year, or that we'll retroactively hear they'd implemented it at the beginning of the month? :) j/k | |} ---- Be happy somthign was said | |} ---- One of the main reasons I don't like using Raptr's numbers for this is their list is based on hours played which for this discussion isn't great. We are more interested in number of players, not how many hours they played because we are seeing a lack of players. The same players who play long hours and start playing less contribute to concurency issues, not less people. Either way, Wildstar is FAR from dead, and is doing decent for a new MMO. All MMO's have the post launch drop, in Wildstar it was more felt due to large numbers of servers & no real marketing done to get the game super hyped. Also, SWTOR is still a sub MMO, even though it is a hybrid model. | |} ---- Be happy that after 25 pages, we had to find the status of this issue elsewhere? Sorry, I hold some people to higher standards. You do know what that is, no? | |} ---- Hopefully they won't hype the game with ads again until after they've addressed some of the player issues, though. Get the endgame non-raiding stuff sorted out, then fire off a flare. If anything, the launch was a little too good for them. It's why they had to open extra servers and why we're so diffuse now. Most of the most vocal complaints obviously come from the expansion servers, which we were never meant to have in the official numbers. It's good to know they're working on something though. We'll see what's in the works. | |} ---- I will wager $50 you are wrong. Now kindly pay up, as Aug 1st has now come and gone. | |} ---- I agree completley that it should have been said on the fourms but if i was working ther i probally wouldent be on these fourms either, look how volitale they are..... i mean im on here lol i wouldent let trolls like me have a chance either | |} ---- ---- | |} ---- None said WS is dead. Many ppl left due to bugs and the rest problems. There is no need for more ppl to leave because of the low pop of servers too. As i said before, many of us can wait (we already waiting for 3 months) for fixes, but not in ghost towns. Give us a solution, so in the meanwhile we can play the game as a mmo intended to be played and not as a single player game. | |} ---- There is a reason I'm posting on the forums and not playing the game. I'm waiting for the statistical results from another thread to explain to the rest of you why that is. | |} ---- ---- And, to be fair, more people track them via reddit and twitter. While I like the ability to type as much as I wants and on official forums no less, I'm well aware of how antediluvian they are. Frost can fire tweets on the go. He'd have to sit at his desk and hammer out text here. Also, as you said above, the forum crowd is a much less pleasant than the twitter crowd. The flames on here, even when they do something popular, are hot and bright. | |} ---- Shouldnt you be out "stalkin" someones "Ma"? | |} ---- ---- ---- I absolutely agree with you, but at this point I'm just happy anything was said. Maybe this was their plan all along. Make us suffer so long that even a tiny scrap of info feels like a huge relief. :P | |} ---- I desperately hope they hit this one out of the park. The fact that they say they are working on some "tech" rather than a "solution" worries me. Tech could mean something like more instancing, but including people from other servers... I don't want instancing, I just want to be on the same server as a bunch of other players, and be able to see them around me and interact with them all the time. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Honestly, at this point, I expect it'll be an "All or Nothing" thing. Either a mega-server thing with two shards (PVE/PVP) or they do it like WoW where five or six servers are put together in certain zones. My *only* fear is that the community we've created on Evindra just goes *poof* with the flip of a switch when we're lumped together with hundreds of other non-RP-friendly players. I mean, I'm happy something is going to be done. I really, truly am. But until I know what, exactly, we're talking about, I'll reserve judgement. | |} ---- How do you think that could happen? Won't you always at the very minimum have tons of awesome housing plots to hang out at? I mean... I guess some of your world events might suffer a bit, but in general? | |} ---- Honestly, I think they should do three. For all the bitching about servers, relatively little comes from Evindra. As the game population rises after improvements are made, there won't be any issues. I seriously don't think Evindra should be lumped in with "PVE" though. We've done a damn good job staying linked at the arms. | |} ---- ---- I just hope the devs see it that way. Again, as I said, at this point though, they may just be in "EMERGENCY EMERGENCY" mode. And double again, I'll wait and reserve judgement until we know, exactly, what their plans are. Having said that, I remember the RP-PVP fiasco "take-backsies" we got hit with a week before launch. Which sort of makes me feel that Carbine has little to no actual regard for the RP communities as a whole and are willing to shutter entire pieces of said communities on little more than "feelings" as was the case with RP-PVP servers. I *hope* that's not the case. I really, really do. However, history has shown they're very willing to go back on promises to the players if it suits someone's "gut instincts" to do so. | |} ---- I ll take any of those 2. Either 2 megaservers or connections like WoW sounds pretty good to me. | |} ---- BTW. I take this back a bit. I remember now that the reason it was so bad in WoW was that you wouldn't get credit for joint kills and stuff like that, and it took way too long for named mobs to re-spawn. With the way WS is set up, it wouldn't be too bad, although resource nodes may be hard to find. | |} ---- ---- Which community on Evindra? Dominion or Exile, I'm kind of interested in making a character on a server with a good community | |} ---- ---- Both are good communities, but Exiles are probably twice as numerous. If you want a good guild, both TexArcana and Scott of Awesome run guilds affiliated with the forum crowd depending on your faction. | |} ---- Both, to be honest. Exile-side has more folks, no lie. But the Domside is very friendly and active, every time I've been over there. (About twice a week, evenings, for an hour or two) If you like Dominion, go there. I don't want to say something ugly like "they need all the help they can get" ... but all the warm bodies they can manage would certainly make our server events more entertaining! | |} ---- ---- Who knows? If they mention what they'll be doing, and it isn't exactly what the forum people demanded, I'm putting on my fire suit. | |} ---- Even if it is exactly what people on the forums have been demanding, I'd still keep that fire suit handy. They'll find a reason to complain. They always do. :P | |} ---- Hey, maybe it'll be something so innovative and awesome we haven't even considered it! Not that people won't complain regardless. As I've said already, I'll reserve judgement until I see the details. | |} ---- *Sigh* *Grabs his firesuit and zips up* Better safe than sorry. | |} ---- Calling it now. They're setting up thousands of computers all connected to one keyboard and mouse, so Tony plays simultaneously with all of us. | |} ---- So long as he doesn't spit Coke Zero on me, I'm cool with that. :D | |} ---- H A R D C O R E #multiboxingdatascape | |} ---- I'm confused are you asking for free transfers from the higher pop servers to the lower pop server or are you asking for free transfers from lower pop to higher pop thus making the lower pop servers even emptier and making the problem far worse? The one and only solution is for carbine to stop the main cause of people leaving and that is to fix PVP arenas/gear, PVE attunement and make having an Alt less punishing (increase amp/ability drop rate or make them account bound) then run a super hard promotion/free trial | |} ---- I am asking for free transfers to the higher pop servers. So everyone can get off the dead realms. Then those realms get nuked after a certain time so no one can accidentally roll on them. There are too many realms, period. The game won't ever (or at least not for the foreseeable future) reach launch numbers. The current server count is for launch numbers. Some realms need to go away permanently. | |} ---- At this point, it's either that (and closing those servers down) *OR* wait until every last person on the ghost town servers quit completely. Seriously. Which is more of a problem? Giving those who've stuck it out a reason to keep playing, or letting them rot in an empty server until they too quit for good? For my money, I'd much rather keep the people we've got than deal with any amount of "maybe if we fix this thing people will come back." Quitters already quit. Hell on 'em. They need to worry about stopping the hemorrhaging now and figure out some other way to lure back the quitters. | |} ---- So you suggest that the solution for the ghost town servers is to cross our fingers and wait when Carbine is going to fix PvP arenas/gear, PvE attunement and having Alt less punishing and after that cross again our fingers hoping that with their super hard promotion and free trials a huge influx of players will fill the empty servers? Btw have you thought that even if a new player comes to game he will have 99% chance to go to the most populated server? Are we going to cross fingers on that too? Waiting for the 1% chance to reject the most populated servers and come to our ghost town? Anyway if this is the "solution" then thx i wont buy. | |} ---- ---- I think the point behind the concept is that if you're putting in all this time to merge servers because of dwindling population, but the game isn't fixed to stop the hemorrhage, then you get to do another server merger soon. As far as priorities go, you have to do your procedure before you sew the wound up. Not that it's not a big issue to deal with, and the best thing to do would be to do it concurrently, but the #1 most important thing on the list is to stop people from leaving and get people to start playing/return to playing. Then, megaservers. | |} ---- I dont see how maknig amp/ability points accountbound would make alts less punishing? If i find an AMP on my main that i need on my alt i just mail it to him lol. However, yes. The main problem isnt that the servers are empty. The problem is that the servers are not getting more populated. Normally you would se a steady stream of players joining the severs. Atm we see maybe a few new players but a lot more who leave. Fixing the game is more important than transfers. But the population is also a part of the problem why people dont buy the full game. They get a free 1-20 (7 days) trial and dont buy the full game because they feel the game is empty. Removing a few servers or opening transfers would make more new people buy the game and then feel obligated to play to 50 (since they have a month free with the gamepurchase). | |} ---- It's an issue of time. They could feasibly do megaservers, but that could require a massive rewrite of some core game systems. Not only would it take a lot of time, they need new naming conventions (so all names aren't taken and they aren't forcing renames), new ways of sharding zones for players, et al. It can be done. It's probably a good idea in the long term since you never have "dead server' or "full server" issues again. But it is extremely resource intensive. | |} ---- ---- ---- For as much as I urge patience, I hope Frost takes your sentiment to heart. The client/designer relationship works best when there's open, honest, and rational communication. If there were a thousand people who were okay to hear a Dev say they know about the problem but didn't have a solution worked out or implemented just yet, we'd probably hear more from them. | |} ---- That would require Tony to actually play the game, and we all know he doesn't. When Sabotage dropped, dude flat out said never reached a high enough level to use a mount, and had no idea how to mount up. | |} ---- I agree, I think Self-Entitled is the phrase Tenner was referring too. | |} ---- I suppose I have no idea of what I need because I still feel salty but I suppose it is better then nothing. | |} ---- ---- ---- They've answered that a few times on these forums, that Twitter is simply a lot more convenient if you're running around and on the go. People check Twitter on their phones, rarely the forums, so guys like Cougar us it a lot more often because they're not sitting in front of their computers reading forums. It's an old way to communicate, really, done for our "convenience". I know we don't move information on forums anywhere near as quick as they move it on Twitter, so I get a lot of it. I appreciate when they post to the forums, as they have recently, but the reason I'm not on Twitter is, of course, my reason. Cougar and devs like him obviously prefer Twitter due to mobility constraints they need to overcome. | |} ---- Not to mention the slews of people ranting in replies to a forum post, those replies are hidden on twitter so I see it as more of a cop-out. Twitter is such a poor way to relay information when tweets are limited to what 150 characters? For an issue that grew as big as this one a professional would put convenience aside and sit his ass down for five minutes! WTF DOES TECH MEAN!!! EDIT: If "tech" means something along the lines of Cross-Realm Zones then that's the nail in the coffin and I'll run from this game like the black plague. I'd rather play in an empty zone/server then have that node I was beaten to appear on a different servers CX. Edited August 26, 2014 by PinkPanther | |} ---- 140 but I digress... It's just convnient for them is all. Though I do agree that your FIRST step should be a post on your own forums, THEN your social media networks. | |} ---- Because they would lose revenue potential. Believe it or not the parent company NCsoft cares about the bottom line and free transfers = loss of revenue, to be able to justify free transfers they would need to get NCsoft to say yes that is ok, we understand we will lose short term revenue but it should be better for us in the long term. IE the weighted net present value of free transfers / server mergers > net present value of doing nothing. Remember NCsoft and Carbine are businesses, businesses are meant to make money | |} ---- Oh, that gets into the entire point of providing information if all it does is set their forums on fire for a few days. Hell, they came on and told us that they were pushing content back to get bug fixes and system changes out as we wanted them, and they got flamed for like 15 pages because people thought that mean the trigger fingers fix wasn't getting out as planned. If there's one thing about the forums, the community on here doesn't always handle information well. They only usually talk to us when they absolutely know what they'll be doing. Because even when they talk, they get flamed over how long it took to come to a decision, or how they posted it, or what they were wearing in the Nexus Report. They're aware that talking to us very rarely makes the situation better. | |} ---- I was following the topic from the first post, reading every comment and I can tell there were no more than a couple of hundred forum members posting. Lets say there were 4-5 times more silent viewers not posting anything and just reading. All that would mean that posting here would immediately reach a thousand or two players at best with all the rough calculation. Stephan Frost has almost 10 thousand followers in Twitter. Simply because of that a Twitter post may spread across forums, reddit and other platforms significantly faster. I see no problem posting important messages on Twitter, even though it is less convenient for me, since I am not among those 10k followers. Hell, those are game news, they matter, but not all that much to worry about hearing them a day or two later. | |} ---- ---- They will lose more subscriptions in the long run. | |} ---- Anger rekindled.. I'M MAD AS HELL! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08 | |} ---- So your reasoning behind calling twitter delivered news a wrong way to do it is because messages there have 140 characters limit? And, Stephan Frost mentions server merges and his twitter post in the latest Nexus Report show! Direct link to the show: http://www.twitch.tv/wildstar/b/562172149 It starts from the 14:35 mark. He says it wasn't really his job to do announcements like that, but he decided to do so anyway. "Devs are listening" kinda thing. And it partly explains why it wasn't posted on forums. Because it's really not his job to do so. The announcement was very much appreciated, Stephan Frost. It's great that we didn't have to wait for the decision to announce the news to go through various departments, which I can guess (especially from SWToR experience) takes a lot of time! Thanks! | |} ---- Thanks for the timestamp, I don't use twitch, spectator gaming isn't my thing. Still though I'm very concerned on the definition of "tech". It raises a more important question for me and that is solution built technology or tweeking made technology such as lifting sharding/phasing or the apocalypse known only as Cross-Zones. | |} ---- Thanks, Folsarc. Without going into too much detail (I'll watch this tonight when I get home) ... what was said? | |} ---- Basically the same as the tweet, that they are looking and talking about the best way to do it. | |} ---- ----